This post is honestly full of misunderstandings and harmful assumptions, so is needed to respond in good faith and clear a few things up.
First off, the math you're using doesn’t hold up. Saying that trans people are “four times more likely” to experience mental health issues doesn’t mean 100 percent of them have a disorder. That’s not how statistics work. If 25 percent of the general population has a diagnosable mental health condition, then four times that is 100 percent only if every single trans person is affected, which isn't what any credible data says. Risk factors don’t equal universal outcomes.
Now, it’s true that trans people face higher rates of mental health challenges, but the cause isn't being trans. It’s how the world treats them. There’s tons of research showing that rejection, family rejection, bullying, harassement, discrimination, and being denied healthcare are what lead to worse mental health outcomes. In fact, when transgender people are accepted, supported, and able to access care, their mental health outcomes improve significantly. Being transgender it’s not that causes distress, it’s being mistreated for it that is the cause.
You also bring up gender dysphoria as if it’s proof of mental illness. That’s not accurate. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, like pregnancy or chronic pain. It’s not a “mental illness” in the sense people often use that term and even in the Internationcal coding of Deiseases it was moved from "mental issues" to "Conditions relative to sexual health". The condition doesn’t mean someone is delusional, it means they’re experiencing real distress because their body and identity don’t line up and usually the disphoria stops right after trans people are ok with their transition and passability level. And here’s the key part: the only treatment that has consistently worked to "cure" gender dysphria is gender-affirming care (including social and sometimes medical transition). Not therapy to “talk them out of it.” Not meds to suppress identity. And definitely not what used to be tried in the past: electroshock, institutionalization, torture or worse. Those methods didn’t help. They traumatized people. Sometimes they killed them.
So if we’re serious about helping people with gender dysphoria, we should listen to what works. Supporting them in their transition works. Trying to “fix” them doesn’t.
Also, lumping trans people together with “transvestites” or saying gay people aren’t “mentally ill”, while trans people are (they both were labeled this way in a recent past), just reinforces outdated and frankly harmful stereotypes.
First: Transgender people have a gender identity different from the sex assigned at birth, just this. Gay/lesbian/bi describes sexual orientation, not gender (and trans people can also be gay or from any orientation) and cross-dressing or transvestism is not inherently linked to being trans or gay. It can be part of a kink, art or lifestyle, but not always. Being trans isn’t a fetish, it isn’t a phase, and it isn’t something people just made up, is something recorded throughout all human history since ancient times. And it’s recognized by every major medical organization in the world, including the American Medical Association, the APA, and the WHO, even in countries who hate queer people.
Also, equating race identity with gender identity (“I identify as Black”) is a false comparison. Race and gender are experienced and constructed very differently in society, and this argument ignores the robust science and lived experience behind trans identities.
Finally, telling a story about a friend who had a bad experience dating a trans person doesn’t prove anything, even your previous story proves it. People have rough relationships all the time, straight, cis, gay and trans people can be jerks too, regardless of gender, people can develop mental ilness at any point of life due to trauma, age or a lot of factors. That’s not a trans issue, that’s a human issue. That doesn’t make an entire group “mentally ill.”
If you genuinely care about mental health, then we should be trying to make the world safer and more accepting for everyone, you should be advocating for better support and treatments even for mentally ill people, not trying to paint trans people like insane people, you wouldn't be doing it to any person with an actual mental illness or medical condition like you do to trans people, so don't buy the ideology of jerk people that are trying to erase trans people out of existence and civil rights. Trans people deserve respect, support, and the right to live their lives without being labeled “insane” just for existing.
They’re not the problem. The stigma is. And the stigma already labeled us, gays, as insane people too in the recent past, denied us health care and put us in prisons and concentration camps, in fact all this anti-trans rethoric is just a re-edition of old tactics used to paint gays and all queer people as ill, predators, insane, nasty, dangerous and a lot of things. They just changed some arguments, but the script is the same.
(And it's the same script used against jews in the past if you look closer, but this is something to talk another time).
Let’s try to be better than this.
